How to Estimate a Construction Project

Use these three simple spreadsheet functions to estimate your projects in less time and with more accuracy.

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Learning how to estimate a residential construction project takes years of experience both in the field and in the office.

For the construction business owner, gaining the experience in the field work is the fun part, and the office work is drudgery.

You produce the field work by building things with your hands.

The office work is hours of staring at a computer screen, often a spreadsheet, trying to produce a proposal for work.

You know how to build it. You think you know how much it should cost, but you are guessing without accurate estimating systems in place.

In this article, I want to show you three simple spreadsheet functions that will show you how to estimate a residential construction project in less time and with more accuracy.

3 SIMPLE SPREADSHEET FUNCTIONS FOR ESTIMATING CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

The 3 simple spreadsheets functions* are:

COPY and PASTE

ABSOLUTE REFERENCE

DATA VALIDATION

* The format for the examples and functions in this post are for Google Sheets. To my knowledge, the functions are similar (if not the same) to functions used with .xls files. Also, I use a Mac. Where I refer to keyboard strokes, I am referring to the Mac OS keyboard strokes. You may need to modify the keystrokes listed here for your particular operating system.

Copy and Paste is one of the most basic functions for a spreadsheet. This function is very similar to the function for most word processing, except in spreadsheets you can copy and paste formulas as well as text.

For example:

Here’s a basic layout for a proposal.

If you wanted to COPY the text ‘Item A’ from cell A3 and populate the cells below A3 with the same text, you can do this in several ways.